Both highway exits and light rail transit stations appear to generate similar impacts on single-family home values. Using a spatial hedonic model to analyze single-family home values in Phoenix, Arizona, researchers found that proximity to a transport node (LRT station or highway entrance/exit) affected the value of nearby homes. The homes closest to these nodes exhibited moderately elevated values, with homes 900 meters from LRT stations or 1,200 meters from highway exits showing the greatest value premiums. Beyond these distances the positive impacts of proximity to these transport nodes began a long, slow decline. These results are in keeping with the researchers’ hypothesis that the negative disamenity effect around transport nodes is relatively small and fades quickly with increasing distance, while the positive accessibility effect is larger and declines more gradually with distance.

The study, by Kihwan Seo, Aaron Golub, and Michael Kuby, will be published in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Transport Geography.